To prove this sort of claim, you'd need to challenge the millions of hours of research geneticists have done, all the open data they've published, all the medical advances they've fueled. Instead, without even considering that the claim might be wrong, without any scientific humility, without linking to any supporting research, Harvard confidently makes the most extreme claim; that zip codes have more predictive power than genes!
Disgraceful and absurd that Harvard would publish something like this. Disgraceful that I believed it even for a moment.
On its face, it doesn't seem that crazy. Location is linked to both wealth and environment, which are both pretty significant factors in health. Do you think most doctors would say that average genetic variation makes a bigger difference than, say, poor childhood nutrition, or smoking?
I have no idea if that is true, but that is one way of reading the title without disregarding all the work done with genetics.
There is indeed a huge distance between DNA and non-genetic diseases and attempt to bridge this gap with a naive probabilistic model will surely yield nonsense.
Social and environmental factors are much more fundamental than actual DNA (gene regulation is still poorly understood) for non-genetic diseases. So, yes, statistically it is true.
I wonder if we'll see those kinds of things in the future. I guess on a long enough timeline, the question isn't if, but when.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/10/illumina-wants-to-sequence...
